Video game industry tries to broaden its appeal

These video games don't sound like anything that would grab a teenage boy's attention, and that's the point. They are part of an important expansion of the video game industry as it works to pull in women, girls and other demographics and cement its place as mainstream entertainment.

A year ago at the E3 Media and Business Summit here in Los Angeles, Nintendo Co. declared that anyone can be a gamer, and that the company would break down the divide between hardcore players and those just beginning to dabble in interactive entertainment. While the divide still exists, games for people who don't fit into the stalwart category of 18-to-34-year-old men are a fast-growing segment of the $18 billion U.S. video game market.

Analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan estimates that five years ago, up to 90 percent of gamers were the core audience of young men. Today, it's more like 60 to 70 percent.

To be sure, much of the focus in the video game industry is still on games like the upcoming "Fallout 3," set in a post-apocalyptic Washington, D.C., where players can kill the enemy in "ridiculously violent ways," as its executive producer, Todd Howard of Bethesda Softworks, put it.

But big companies like Nintendo, Microsoft Corp., Electronic Arts Inc. and Ubisoft Entertainment SA have realized the enormous growth potential of mass-market games. A quarter of Ubisoft's worldwide sales of $1.5 billion came from its "casual games" business in the most recent fiscal year--casual games often being the industry's extremely broad term for everything other than what the young male demographic wants. This was the first year the company measured casual games as a separate division, said Tony Key, senior vice president of sales and marketing.

To try to reach more girls, Ubisoft offers its "Imagine" series, which lets 6- to 14-year-old girls play fashion designer, rock star or figure skater. Ubisoft also has "Horse Riders," in which players can create a farm of wild horses.

It's unlikely to get any love from gaming blogs and reviewers, but if Ubisoft's past games for girls are any indication, it will at least make the company some money.

Game companies that have long been selling to teenage boys now want to rope in not only their sisters but also their kid brothers and parents. No company has been as successful in this as Nintendo, which has sold more than 10 million of its $250 Wii consoles in the U.S. since its late 2006 launch, despite widespread supply constraints.

Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata, says he hopes to eventually blur the lines between games and other forms of entertainment. "We should expand the (games) business to music and movies," he said through an interpreter.